by Simon Barnes
The axolotl, a creature that has won a certain amount of glory for the oddness of its name, comes from this group. It is a salamander found only in two lakes in Mexico; alas, one of these has been drained and the other reduced to a series of canals. The axolotl is now categorised as critically endangered on the IUCNI Red Data List. The threat increases as Mexico City continues its inexorable spread.
Caudatans have one particularly odd characteristic: they can regenerate entire limbs. The shedding and regrowth of the tail is a trait they share with lizards, but salamanders and newts can go one better: if they lose a leg they simply acquire a new one. This remarkable ability has fired the imaginations of scientists, who are experimenting with stem-cell technology to see if humans could manage the same trick. They are doing most of this work with axolotls. There is a sermon to be preached here: be careful which species you allow to go extinct, because you never know what use you will find for them. While there are better arguments against extinction than the fact that humans might one day find them useful, it’s still a handy reminder of the value of diversity of life on earth.
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I. The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. The Red Data Book was established in 1963 and is accepted as the global authority on the status of species. Critically Endangered is the highest category before Extinct in the Wild.
Cannibal sex
Jean-Henri Fabre had a revolutionary idea. Instead of killing insects and sticking them on a card and trying to classify them, he watched them. For him, a living animal had more meaning than a dead one. He wrote about the lives of insects not with detachment but with passion. He was called “the Homer of the insects”. Perhaps he was more of a Joyce in his innovative nature, the staggering originality of his vision and the unstemmable fountain of his prose: as if Molly Bloom were an entomologist. He never bought into Darwinism, though Darwin called him “an inimitable observer”. It was observation that Fabre excelled at: that and an almost incontinent need to communicate his discoveries. He was a great loather of pomposity: what he cared about was living things and vibrant, meaning-filled communication. He was one of the great life-affirmers. He wrote: “Others again have reproached me with my style, which has not the solemnity, nay, better, the dryness of the schools. They fear lest a page that is read without fatigue should not always be the expression of the truth. Were I to take their word for it, we are profound only on condition of being obscure.” I have endeavoured to follow this principle in everything I have ever written on wildlife.I
Fabre lived most of his life in Avignon, and his most vivid subject was the heat-loving insect-life of Provence. It was in Provence that I first came face to face with a praying mantis. Quite literally so: I was crawling through the undergrowth in the Camargue with a view to getting close to a flock of flamingos. I was on a French exchange visit, those fraught occasions that are supposed to do one so much good. (It’s a bit like an arranged marriage, I suppose, but without the sex.) I was brought up short by the mantis, which I showed to André, my French ami, in sudden wonder. Contemptuously – no doubt thinking I was exhibiting typically English fearfulness – he flicked at it with his finger and sent the damn thing spinning. I wasn’t really frightened by it, though: a little alarmed, yes, but in a rather thrilling way. I hadn’t thought that my eyes would ever alight on so exotic a creature: gazing back at me, apparently engaging in eye contact, with an oddly human expression: mild eyes, weak pointed chin and those “hypocritically” praying limbs, as Gerald Durrell wrote. In My Family and Other Animals, Durrell writes of a fight between Geronimo, a gecko, and Cicely, a praying mantis, that took place “above, on and in my bed”. To come across one of the participants of that battle was a strange privilege.
The praying mantis, Mantis religiosa, is one of 2,400 species of mantis. They all possess the strange humanlike face and the savage grasping arms, crooked in apparent prayer: raptorial legs that can reach out and clasp prey in an instant. Almost all mantises work as daytime ambush predators, using exceptional eyesight. The queer arrangement – an eye on each of the upper corners of the triangular face – gives a large area of stereoscopic vision: that is to say, two-eyed vision with real depth perception. The characteristic bobbing and swaying motion of the mantis is reminiscent of the way a kingfisher constantly ducks its head. This shifting of angle is used for the same reason: to get a better three-dimensional fix before striking. An ambush predator needs to be hidden, and mantises go in for camouflage, most of them adopting an all-purpose green or brown, but some tropical species operate elaborate disguises to become leaves and flowers. This tactic helps them both to prey and to avoid predation: the luxury of the alpha predator is unknown to those lower down in the Greek alphabet. A lion doesn’t have to look for a safe place because a lion is a safe place. Not so for a fat and juicy mantis.
The edibility of the mantis is perhaps the most famous thing about them. They go in for sexual cannibalism. Fabre observed a male mantis actually offering his head to a female. If she accepts, it means that she can snack on his brain while he copulates. A male can copulate long after his brain has been devoured. The female carries on eating while the male carries on copulating, eventually, as Fabre said, the two “become one flesh in a far more intimate fashion”. He had one female under observation who devoured seven husbands in a week.
Subsequent studies have demonstrated that a male, when deprived of his head, becomes a much more vigorous lover. He is capable of copulating twice as long and his chances of fertilising the female are doubled. The best chance of getting your genes to live on, the best chance of becoming an ancestor, is to leap on top of a female and lose your head in the process. There is a clear opportunity here to make all kinds of analogies with human life, but I shall leave that job, dear reader, to you.
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I. Another line of Fabre I have taken to heart: “I have made it a rule of mine to adopt the method of ignorance… I read very little… I know nothing. So much the better: my queries will be all the freer, now in this direction, now in the opposite, according to the light obtained.”
Beautiful shirts
And there are still more of them. More things of beauty and wonder, an eternal brilliant bewildering rain of them. Like Gatsby’s shirts: “He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-coloured disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher – shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.
“ ‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed her voice muffled into the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before.’ ”
A famous scene in The Great Gatsby. As I write this book, there are times when I feel like Gatsby, revelling in showing off such richness; at other times more like Daisy, overwhelmed by what I am looking at. Many novelists, myself included, have experienced that wonderful feeling when a story and a character take on a life of their own, apparently quite independent of the author: the characters speak their lines from the depths of their own personalities and the story unwinds in a certain direction because there is no other way in which it can go. The novelist seems, during these suspended, fragile passages, not to be writing as much as taking dictation. Writing this book has sometimes been like that, only more so, for none of it comes from my imagination, conscious or otherwise. Life’s endless forms just come welling up from the earth as Gatsby’s shirts rained down from the sky. All I have to do is try and record some of them as they describe their brief parabola before us.
Which brings me to the caecilians. They’re amphibians, but not as we know them: nothing like frogs or salamanders or newts. They are the amphibians of obscurity, creatures
who mostly live beneath the earth, seldom seen, not understood overly well, not attracting much interest when they turn up. They don’t look like frogs and salamanders: they don’t look much like vertebrates at all, more like earthworms. They even have a segmented appearance, because they carry ring-shaped folds in their skin. Some are as gorgeous in colour as Gatsby’s shirts: blue, pink, orange, yellow, striped like a humbug. No monograms, though. More are drab earth colours. They are not beautiful in human eyes, not like the blue morpho butterfly, but all the animals in this book, just like all the animals not in this book, have something of wonder about them. The secret amphibians are as wonderful as birds of paradise and tigers.
There are around 200 of them in nine families, though naturally, there are rival methods of classifying them. Most caecilians are burrowers: talented and effective, with a strong skull and a pointed snout. They have no limbs, and their eyes can do no more than tell them whether nor not it’s dark: important information because a caecilian that came up to the surface in daylight would be extremely vulnerable. They are found in the tropics around the world in appropriately wet places. Their strong suit is smell: they have retractable tentacles between the eyes and nostrils that collect and transmit chemical signals. They range in size from 12 cm, just over 4 inches, to 1.6 m, more than 5 feet. The burrowers emerge at night and hunt for earthworms, termites and other inverts. Most of them fertilise their eggs inside the body and the female gives birth either to live larvae, or in some cases, miniature adults.
Thus a large group of terrestrial vertebrates – creatures of our own kind – manages to make its living without impinging at all on human consciousness. There are no caecilian stories, no caecilian myths, no caecilian recipes. They are creatures we haven’t even noticed: and could lose entirely without noticing. Question: would we be the poorer for their loss? It’s like the sound of the tree that falls in the deserted forest: does an extinction matter if humans were scarcely aware that the creature existed in the first place? That’s one for philosophers. Here’s my contribution to the debate:
It’s not all about humanity.
Unreal city
So there’s yet another form on the internet you have to fill in. Address, it demands, starring the space as a compulsory field. Insisting on a house number, even if your house hasn’t got one. And then there’s a space labelled “city”. Because we all live in cities, don’t we? That’s at least slightly true. The assumption that a person lives in a city stands up pretty well in a rough and ready sort of way. City has become the default mode of living. The modern city is where humans get on with the business of life: Shanghai, 18 million, Istanbul, 14 million, Karachi, 13 million, Moscow, Mumbai, Tehran, Beijing, all with 12 million. New York and London have eight million each: rural hamlets, merely. How long have we been living like this? Depends on how you define city: at the first establishment at some river crossing? At the first million? At the first high-rise building? Two thousand years, 200 years, since the end of the World War Two? In evolutionary terms, any one of those periods is an eyeblink. We evolved as savannah-dwellers, to live in extended family groups and small gatherings called tribes: now we’re all on top of each other, living among strangers and wondering why life is sometimes so difficult and so out of joint.
Termites have been at it for millions of years, probably since the early Jurassic, which is to say around 150 million years ago. They do the large community thing in a way that dismays human sensibilities. The lives of individuals are nothing in a termite colony: it is all about the good of the community as a whole; the continuation and spread of the genes represented by that colony, to put the thing in evolutionary terms. Self-sacrifice and suicide are routine aspects of life in many termite colonies. The obvious and inevitable comparison with human societies is deeply disconcerting.
Termites build on a massive scale. The wooded savannahs of Zambia are studded with termite mounds: they are as much a feature of the landscape as the trees. My old friend Phil Berry has calculated that one per cent of all Zambia is a termite mound. I have frequently climbed to the top of one to get a better idea of what was happening all around me: any small eminence on a floodplain is a useful thing. I have seen lions doing the same thing, for they love a good view. The big old male baboons often stretch out on a termite mound to keep watch as the rest of the troop forages. Termites have done as much to create this landscape as the tree-clearing elephants.
And by recycling organic matter into their edible selves they play a crucial part in the ecosystem. Termites feed on dry and damp wood, on leaf litter, on dung and on grass. There are around 2,600 species of them, all in the hotter places of the world. For termites, it’s all about the nest or mound or city: they define themselves by their habitation; constructions that can be so vast that it is impossible to believe it was the labour of so small a creature. Great domes rise 10 feet, 3 m, above the savannah, often with a vast and centuries-old tree growing from them. In some places termites build baroque sky-reaching structures up to 9 m or 30 feet tall, looking a little like the Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona. In Australia compass termites build blade-shaped nests on a north-south axis: they catch the sun for its warmth in the morning and again in the evening but minimise its worst during the heat of the day.
All termite structures are built around a complex system of tunnels and chambers and shafts. Convection currents function as air-conditioning. The airflow keeps the temperature in the brood chambers to within a single degree of the optimum. Humidity is maintained even in the dry season by controlled condensation. Some of the more ambitious species go in for underground gardening, farming a fungus that has evolved along with the termites. It is nourished by the excrement of the inmates and is self-perpetuating: the spores from the fungus germinate on fresh faecal pellets. How did this deeply complex system begin? No doubt it was some accident or series of accidents, one that worked for mutual profit and so became, as it were, formalised into the lives of the termites. All it takes is a few tens of millions of years and you have a system of uncanny perfection.
Termites are eusocial animals, like the two species of mole rats we’ve already encountered: that is to say they work on a reproductive division of labour – not all members of the colony are involved in reproduction. There are overlapping generations and they go in for cooperative care of the young. Many species of wasps, bees and ants are also eusocial animals.
Termites are divided into castes, which will include an egg-laying queen that can live for 45 years, and sometimes a king, who will service her all her life. There are workers, and some species have soldiers. In some cases, these soldiers have armour and pincers so large and ferocious that they can’t feed themselves, but must, like juveniles, be fed by the workers. Their main job is to defend the nest from marauding ants: when there is an invasion, one soldier will block the breach until he is killed, and his place is taken by another. When the gap is too great for a single hero, the soldiers form a wedge or phalanx and make a wall to keep out the invaders, while the workers repair the damage behind them. In plain terms, they go into battle to die. One species, the tar baby termite, repels invaders by means of suicide. The soldiers lethally rupture a gland in their own bodies to release a yellow fluid that engulfs the invaders.
Termites also produce sexual forms with wings, creatures that set off in search of adventure and to form a new colony. In the Luangwa Valley they will do this when the rains come at the end of the six-month dry season, producing a bonanza of flying insects: so massive a spewing-forth of protein that martial eagles, one of the most majestic birds in creation, will go slumming for termites and sit by the exit of a mound to gorge themselves on these would-be sexual adventurers. Many die: but new colonies are still formed and the savannah still undulates with termite mounds.
It is a perfect society: the totalitarian dream in action. The only flaw in it, so far as human society is concerned, is that humans are not termites. Perhaps 150 million years of city life will bring about some changes
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“Fish”
You know the way penguins leave the sea when there’s a leopard seal in the water? Whizzing up headfirst and somehow landing flat-footed on the ice cliff above? Popping up together like a thousand champagne corks? Looks impossible, I know, but it’s not actually all that hard. I’ve done it. More or less, anyway. It happened when I was snorkelling off Bali. We set off as the sun rose in a small boat propelled by a charming Balinese (more or less a tautology). At this length I can’t remember his name, but it was probably Ketut: there are only four names in common use on that lovely island. So when we got to the coral I lowered myself off the boat and spent a happy hour or so among the inhabitants of the reef, taking in the gloriously biodiverse colours of the community: as if all the richness of the Animal Kingdom were laid before me. I cruised weightless above it all. At times I folded in half like a clasp-knife to dive, getting splendidly deep with just a few flips of the fins, negatively buoyant as I am. Allowing myself to drift back to the surface, I cleared the tube with a great Moby Dick blast and then trudged on, passing from one wonder to the next.